“... in the folk mythology that’s been exploited, in America, at one level by comedians like Lenny Bruce and Jackie Mason, and at quite another level, by Jewish novelists. American fiction’s most single-minded portrait of the goy is in The Assistant by Bernard Malamud. The goy is Frank Alpine, the down-and-out thief who robs the failing grocery store of the ...”

“... trial attracted much attention at the time, and when Helen Selwyn was sentenced it made the front page of some British newspapers. But the case was soon forgotten, unlike the more lurid pieces of white mischief which went on in the so-called Happy Valley. Yet the Selwyn affair mattered more, and like George Orwell’s Burmese Days (published in the same ...”

“... I interrupted to say: ‘That’s Stanisław Lem’s translator!’3 The science fiction page in the HBJ catalogue featuring my book had only two other authors on it: Lem and Calvino. Kandel told me stories of Lem zipping around Vienna in his lemon yellow sports car. Heaven.Once I was on my way, I unashamedly plundered a hallucinatory set-piece from ...”

“... Ai got a copy of the 27 December lab report. This time the coronavirus finding was printed on the page. After alerting her superiors, she drew a red circle round the part of the report identifying Sars coronavirus in the patient, photographed it, and sent the image to a group of medical friends and colleagues. It quickly spread online. Among the doctors who ...”

“... strike group, told reporters that the crew had been ordered not to talk about the burial. Captain Bruce Lindsey, skipper of the Carl Vinson, told reporters he was unable to discuss it. Cameron Short, one of the crew of the Carl Vinson, told the Commercial-News of Danville, Illinois, that the crew had not been told anything about the burial. ‘All he knows is ...”

“... that kept cresting, cresting, then crashing into depths of foaming guilt and fury.Not since Lenny Bruce had there been such a virtuoso desperado, but how far could Roth ride his comic daimon without it becoming a shtick? After the overblown burlesques of the Watergate satire Our Gang and the Kafkaesque fabulism of The Breast and his baseball opus The Great ...”

“... she tried to gather herself for a final push. ‘Please pray for me,’ she wrote on her Facebook page. ‘There’s a fire in my council block. I can’t leave the flat. Please pray for me and my mum.’Some people never got out of bed, the fumes killing them while they slept. This seems to have been the fate of Ligaya Moore, a 78-year-old woman who came ...”